


Feeling Good

by SnowStormSkies



Category: Tokio Hotel
Genre: Depression, Established Relationship, Exploration, F/M, Good, Medication, Therapy, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 18:20:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3457142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnowStormSkies/pseuds/SnowStormSkies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything is warm and calm, and Ria loves it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feeling Good

**Author's Note:**

  * For [casey270](https://archiveofourown.org/users/casey270/gifts).



 

Blankets, check.

Coffee, check.

Curtains drawn, check.

Ria would find it difficult to believe that she’s fallen so quickly - so easily - into Tom’s routine of an early morning bedtime, but it’s true; she has. The twins live by night, hiding away from the day, and it only took her a few weeks to understand that, to slip into it like it’s second nature to her.

It feels strange to go home again after so long living like the twins. Every time she goes back to her parents house for a few short days, when the twins are out on official business or exploring the exotic beaches of the Maldives, it’s always a shock to revert back to sleeping during the night, being awake while the sun is up.

Eating at normal hours, instead of breakfast at dinner time and dinner at the crack of dawn is also interesting.

That’s not to say the twins don’t eat well. They might say they live off of fast food, but it’s only fast because Simone stocks them up with a freezer full of stew, soup, and roasted meat and vegetables every time she visits.

It’s been more helpful than ever with Bill’s health the last couple of months - having food on hand and just… There’s a lot less pressure about eating if it’s just reheating a thing in a saucepan or in the microwave.

“He in the shower?” Bill leans into the bedroom, swinging on the doorframe by his fingertips. He looks so fragile. He’s not wearing his shoes yet, but he _is_ actually wearing clothes; nice ones: Jeans, a t-shirt, and he’s carrying a grey hoodie. It’s an improvement from the last _week_ of jogging bottoms and ratty t-shirts with fraying hems and holes, which were fine on their own, but when they were holes created by neglect rather than intention, it wasn’t okay.

“Yeah. You off to Andi’s?” If Bill isn’t in his room at home, or glued to Tom’s side, he’s there, hiding from the paparazzi.

“No. Mama’s.” Bill smiles, and it’s soft and shy again. He’s looked way, way too down the last couple of days, so this is a good look for him. It’s been a while since Simone was here - about a month or so, and Ria knows the twins enjoy spending time with their mother. But she’s not going to let Bill go with just that little announcement.

He’s happy, and that means she can talk to him, get him to open up a little, and that’s just what she intends to do. .

“It’s a _brave_ sacrifice.” She grins, nodding her head towards the bathroom. “Bring something back for him.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.” Bill sniffs, but he’s smiling back at her. “And why?”

“Because I eat anything he doesn’t  when he’s not looking, and there’s no calories in stolen food.” Ria does steal things from Tom. All the time. His sweatshirts, his hoodies, his t-shirts. Food from the stash he keeps under his bed because Bill would eat all his boxes of precious candy collected on tour if he knew they existed. His blanket whenever they’re cuddling on the couch.

His time. His heart. His kisses.

His love.

Bill shuffles his bare feet and shrugs. “I will.”

“Come on. Have a seat until he gets out of the bathroom.” Ria pats the bed next to her. She doesn’t care about only being in her shorts and tank top that she uses to sleep in, around Bill.

Why should she? It’s not like the twins care around her. Bill regularly wanders from the shower to his bedroom in the buff, for God’s sake.

Tom’s only slightly better.

Heathens, both of them.

He sits down on the bed ungracefully, sprawling beside her in that familiar way that means he’s actually been wanting to do this for a while.

Bill goes through phases of being needy - of wanting touch and attention and needing time to go shopping with him, even if it’s just sitting next to him and pointing out pretty things as he scrolls through the hundreds of shopping websites he has bookmarked on his computer.

Other times, it might as well be like he’s vanished into thin air He’s gone for days, ghosting in and out of the house on a whim. Sometimes, he stays with Andi. Sometimes, only Tom knows where he’s gone.

Tom doesn’t like that.

Bill calls it his alien abduction time. When the meds are being changed or when he’s going through a tough time, he always says he feels different - wrong, and altered and like the real world isn’t so real anymore.

It’s a side effect of the meds, but Bill says it’s still pretty awful.

When she’d learnt that, Bill’s obsession with _humans versus humanoid_ and _alien_ in Tokio Hotel’s last album sounds a lot less like a funny, silly, post modern take on life, and a lot like personal feelings and needs bleeding into his work.

He’s been getting better, though. Although Bill was diagnosed before the release of the album, it’s only been in the last few months that he’s actually working through it as opposed to against it. The therapy’s working, and the twins are making things happen with regards to pushing forward. Bill might say that they’re stupid doctors when he’s not having a great time of it, but the doctors are helping him through his depression, and out the other side with meds and stuff like that, rather than just experimenting on him. And they’re helping to give both twins coping skills when it comes to dealing with Bill’s mental health.

It’s not that he’s fragile. He isn’t. Bill is one of the toughest, most unflinching people Ria has ever met, and that’s saying something. But after years and years and years of non-stop media attention, non-stop touring and living on buses and in hotels, and his vocal surgery not actually that long ago, he’s begun to buckle.

Ria combs her fingers through his newly dyed hair and Bill sighs softly. He’s actually starting to relax.

“You take your meds today?” It’s just a question, but one they’ve been asking every day for the last two months.

“Yes, I have. With that horrible protein shake that Tom left for me.” Tom is hot on Bill’s meds, counting the doses left in the blue box in the kitchen beside the kettle, and pre-making the vanilla coffee protein shake, but Bill is better at actually taking them if someone does that for him.

Tom just motherhens.

Even though he says he doesn’t, he does. A lot.

But Bill’s not so spiky about it now, and he occasionally even agrees with Ria and thinks it’s sweet. When Tom isn’t around to hear, of course.

She moves away from the topic, knowing that Bill doesn’t enjoy talking about it. “When you going back to the hairdresser?”

“Dunno. Nat’s coming over next week to talk about style.”

Ria likes Natalie. She’s whipcrack sharp and very knowledgeable about all things fashion and make-up related, but also all things twin related.

Sometimes, it’s nice to have a woman to talk to, who knows the band and their needs but also who knows how to step outside that world. They’ve had a few coffee mornings together, and Ria is looking forward to their next one.

Natalie’s promised to show her the pictures she took from behind the scenes at a fashion show in Italy.

“What are you aiming for?” She pulls a curl out gently, but it springs right back again - proof that the twins might not have inherited Simone’s brilliant scarlet hair, but they did inherent those curls.

Bill looks contemplative. “Mohawk?” He’s been batting around ideas after losing the dreadlocks - white yarn ones, with a few black, too - but before now had yet to settle on a single style.

Frankly, if it was bald, Ria could cope. Tom’s only input on their discussion of it was that Bill looked nice with blue hair, _and could he please stop wearing Tom’s work out hoodie, because he was going to the gym, and that meant Bill could no longer steal it._

“I like it.”

She does. The twins are exploring other styles now, and she’s enjoying watching it happen around her.

Fashion is an artform, and it’s one she’s learnt well.

The twins are taking time to learn a lot of things, recently, not just about fashion and design, even though Tom’s already in consultations with Reebok about representation trainers.

She’d say he had a shoe fetish with the amount of pairs he had, but he’s shown _zero_ interest in her high heels.

Beyond the obligatory, _I like them, let’s go now, please_ as he hustled her out the door and into the car for dinner or a date or just going back home. _._

For all the twins are well travelled and well seasoned in the art of looking nonchalant, they really have no coping skills when it comes to the real world. Money, housing, furniture, everything was kind of fluid when it came down to it, and it took a long time for them to wake up to that.

For God’s sake, when Ria first hooked up with Tom, he didn’t even carry real money (hadn’t since he was about fifteen), and had no actual concept of the cost of things.

It wasn’t because he was stupid, or because he didn’t understand. To him, a company credit card was assigned to him, and he put everything on it from clothes to coffee to taxi rides to and from her flat in Berlin.

To Ria, a cup of coffee from Starbucks (single shot, two sugars, half a shake of cinnamon if she felt under the weather) took forty minutes of her working day to earn,  when she worked for her father in his small handmade cosmetics company as a label sticker (long before she started walking the bikini strut as a beauty queen, but it’s the kind of thing you don’t forget.)

For Tom, it took one swipe of his card, and someone else dealt with the bill.

It’s only in the last few months that she’s actually convinced him to let go of that, to start thinking about how much things cost. And you know. Four or five cups of quad shot full caff coffee everyday isn’t exactly good for anybody, never mind someone with ADHD.

Even she knows that.

The twins relied on others to do basic things like food shopping or buying furniture, and it was one of the most bizarre yet… not quite endearing, but pretty close, things about them. It was nice to take Tom shopping in supermarkets, show him what it was like to actually be a normal person again.

Kissing in the car afterwards, rewarding him for his patience, was never a bad thing.

But recently, as the media and the general public have become increasingly aware of her relationship with Tom, it’s had to change, and once again, the twins retreated inwards.

But this time, they took her with them.

And that was something else.

She’ll never get used to the hordes of paparazzi and screaming fans that follow them wherever they go. Never. But the big house in the woods is something she can get used to, and has done.

A lot. A whole fourteen months have gone by, and she’s weathered a lot with them. She travelled with them on and off for tour, lived through the fights with Gustav and the loud partying that the whole band enjoyed. Endured the endless intrusions into her privacy about her life.

Enjoyed helping Tom pick out the beautiful dog downstairs in the den.

She combs her fingers through Bill’s hair, smoothing down the fine strands and watches him slowly go from being tense and frustrated to relaxed and halfway to sleep.

They talk about inconsequential things - Natalie, hairstyles, Ria’s newest piece of jewellery from Tom that Bill inspects carefully. The wooden bracelet isn’t cheap; it’s beautifully crafted and varnished, and each wooden bead is like a gem in and of itself, and Bill declares it _very pretty_ once he’s finished.

She promises to paint his nails after therapy on Thursday, and he says _I’ll hold you to it._

He will. 

Tom is a long time in the bathroom. He likes to spend time in the shower;  it’s his alone time, away from the world. Ria’s lost count of the number of times she’s come in to find him sitting in the bottom of the cubicle, just staring at the floor, lost in his own mind.

Thinking about the future.

By the time he comes out, Bill has stretched out across the king sized bed, his head in her lap, and she’s stroking his face.

“Hi, Tom.” Bill says, without even opening his eyes.

“Evening.” Tom quirks an eyebrow at her, and Ria shrugs. Whatever works at the moment, that’s what’s she gonna take and not ask any questions. Bill’s actually wanting touches and being close to someone, and she’s happy to provide that. “Are you staying tonight?”

“Nope - off out.”

“You driving?”

“Tobi is. Mama’s invited me over for more mother-son bonding time.” Whatever Simone’s version is of that. Ria has had the joy of mother-son’s-girlfriend bonding time, and instead of involving a spa trip or shopping, Simone got her to be her still life model.

Interesting but… not entirely what Ria had expected.

At least Simone saved the request for a nude modelling session until _after_ the fourth visit.  

“Okay.” Tom looks visibly relieved. After some asshole drove Bill off the road two weeks ago, he’s been rather… sensitive about his twin’s driving. Ria is too, but it’s not her place to actually say that outloud, no matter how much she worries. Bill has his license, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before he allows anybody to pry it out of his fingers after it took him three goes at his test before he finally got it. “What time are you leaving?” Tom drops the towel from around his waist onto the back of the desk chair and wanders over to the oversized chest of drawers in the far corner. Ria observes.

Closely.

But like she said, both the twins aren’t nudists, but heathens. They don’t bother covering up a lot of the time between getting out of the shower or the hot tub and getting dressed again. They seem to view it not as exhibitionistic but just… unnecessary.

And who is Ria to argue? Especially since she’s seeing the hard work Tom’s been putting in the gym so very often.

When she feels Bill’s fingers tapping on her hand, she looks down. He grins up at her, knowing exactly what she was doing.

She smiles back. She used to work on the catwalk - there is no shame in her anymore, really. You kind of get rid of that stuff when you have to strip and walk almost entirely naked in front of a room full of people for some bigwigs to give you a score from one to ten based on how well your genetics played out.

Tom forgoes the possibility of a shirt, ends up in just a pair of dark grey sweatpants, old and worn soft, but Ria likes them.

They hide _nothing._

He swings the desk chair around, straddling it and watches Ria and Bill. There’s no jealousy in his face, nothing but contentment in his eyes. He likes it when Bill is well, not suffering through a bad patch, and this has been one of the longer good patches in a while.

“How is Mama?”

“Fine. She wants you to come over for dinner next week. She said to bring your _girlfriend who is not a girlfriend.”_

Ria snorts. Tom is not the quickest at coming up with responses to Simone’s probing, and that was his first blurted reaction to _is this thing between Ria and you an actual thing now?_

At four weeks, when Simone asked the question, it might not have been, but now it is. But it still stuck around.

“You want to?”

“Sure.” It’s nice to be considered enough of a partner to be invited along and she likes Simone. All the more reason to go.

Bill and Tom talk more, discussing something about Berlin and their meeting that’s coming up with the people at the label. Ria gets the sense that something big is happening but the twins have yet to share it with anybody, never mind her. Everything has code words or … _you know_ s or _the thing_ or _the thing we were discussing,_ and it’s irritating, but she’ll get past it.

One way or another.

She carries on combing her fingers through Bill’s hair and lets the twins sink into their own world for a while. It’s nice to let it wash over her.

This is the kind of world nobody else will see with the twins - not the fans, not the paps, not even their bandmates. Just the two of them talking, batting ideas back and forth without even finishing sentences, using gestures in place of words.

It’s what she’s come to love about being in this relationship - peace and serenity is not common, but when it happens, it’s total and absolute.

She feels right at home.


End file.
